NotEnoughAV1Encodes-Qt VS OpenMediaVault

I like using NotEnoughAV1Encodes. There's also Av1an, and ab-av1.

I wish AV1 had more compatibility. Just playing around with NotEnoughAV1Encodes took a dumb 10-second clip with almost no movement from 24MB from my DSLR to 1.1MB after the AV1 encode. It's a bad example for a video, but I was just randomly trying AV1 with things and was impressed with the ratio.

If I'm not in a hurry for something to process then I set it to run on that. For instance, when I was looking at the AV1 codec I had it grinding NotEnoughAV1Encodes for days at a time.

If you want to mess with AV1, then there's AV1an that has a feature to target a VMAF. ab-av1 has their 'crf-search.' Although, most of the time I just use NotEnoughAV1Encodes with settings I like. Although, granted AV1 has less compatibility and it takes forever.

For some things, I've been going even slower using AV1 with NotEnoughAV1Encodes. Although, there's less compatibility for AV1, so keep that in mind.

NotEnoughAV1Encodes is great for AV1, I'm not savvy enough to get AV1 to grind all my CPU cores without it.

Do you do any videos? I've been playing with the AV1 codec using 'NotEnoughAV1Encodes'

Do you mess around with video at all? I just found out about the AV1 codec. Been using NotEnoughAV1Encodes to use all my computer cores to compress video. Then comparing the quality difference with ffmpeg-quality-metrics using VMAF. 33-second test video with my phone went down from 23MB to 1.6MB with nearly no quality difference. It takes forever to encode though. May not be compatible with all devices/browsers/etc. Then there's ab-av1 to help find the best settings.

this program is pretty boss, https://github.com/Alkl58/NotEnoughAV1Encodes-Qt

You might want to consider the previously mentioned MergerFS and SnapRAID, or MDADM and LVM for your setup. OpenMediaVault [https://www.openmediavault.org/ is a solid choice in this regard. Additionally, if you're planning to run something like Proxmox, you could look into deploying Starwind CVM on top of it. Pretty much like in this guide: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/ .

You would better to install OMV instead. It's a ready to use fileserver solution with web interface.

So I'm working on a similar setup with an ancient desktop my in-laws were getting rid of. I installed OpenMediaVault directly to the hard drive (it's so old that I assume it wouldn't work too well as a hypervisor), with a 4TB external HDD attached. OMV supports Docker by means of a plug-in and I'm running a Jellyfin container with no issues at all. I'm still manually downloading everything to the HDD but *arr containers are my next step, as well as setting up a gluetun container to route all that through a VPN.

That is possible (it's automated to a certain extent). It also depends on the NAS OS. Unraid, for example, can work with drives of different sizes while using the largest one for parity. TrueNAS uses ZFS so you won't be able to just add a drive to your RAIDZ and expand it. There's also openmediavault: https://www.openmediavault.org/ that uses Linux Software RAID and you can add a new drive there but you can't combine drives of different sizes. And there's also Starwinds NAS that supports both Linux Software RAID and ZFS: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas. Plus, I would avoid SMR drives in RAID: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/

I'd put it like that: if you have a spare PC, then it's definitely worth trying. I would also look into openmediavault (minimal RAM needs): https://www.openmediavault.org/ and Starwinds NAS (supports both ZFS and Linux software RAID): https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas